Ogham stone, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

An elaborately carved cross-slab pulled from the rubble of a Kerry cashel turns out to carry an ogham inscription that nobody has yet been able to read.

That combination, painstaking early medieval artistry alongside script that defeats translation, makes this stone quietly unlike most examples of either category. Ogham is an early Irish alphabet typically cut as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a standing stone, most often recording a personal name in a formulaic commemorative phrase. Here, though, the ogham runs down a vertical stem-line incised onto one narrow side of the slab, terminates in a circle at the top and an oval with a diamond motif at the base, and yields only the sequence LBMCBDV when read from bottom to top, a string of characters that has resisted interpretation since at least the early twentieth century. R. A. S. Macalister, examining it in 1945, could make out only the L before the M, while John Rhys, writing in 1902, read three of the scores differently again.

The stone itself was found during 19th-century restoration work at Caher Murphy, an oval cashel, essentially a stone-walled ringfort, on the southern slopes of Mount Eagle above Dingle Bay. At roughly 1.39 metres tall above its stand and 0.63 metres wide at the base, it is not a large piece, but almost every surface carries decoration. One broad face presents a Maltese cross set within a subcircular frame, the cross formed by four sunken panels separated by narrow grooves just a centimetre wide. Below it, flanking the stem, are two small saltire crosslets, and directly beneath the stem crouches a human figure in a short tunic, its upstanding hair possibly a halo, its stick-like arms bent at the elbows, its feet turning outwards in opposite directions. Spiral and chevron bands descend on either side and are joined at the bottom by a C-curve. The opposite face carries a Greek cross with widely expanded terminals and, lower down, a triple figure-of-eight knot formed from a single continuous strand that loops and frames the design above and below. The remaining narrow side is covered in a worn interlace pattern. No single element is unique in early medieval Irish stonework, but the density of motifs packed onto all four surfaces of one relatively modest slab is unusual.

The stone no longer sits in Kerry. It was removed at some point to join the ogham collection of the National Museum of Ireland and is currently held in Daingean, Co. Offaly, a long way from the Atlantic slopes where it was made and the cashel wall where it spent centuries waiting to be noticed.

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